Desert Moisture

Wet weather in southern New Mexico is, to me, unusual.  We have just passed a storm system that brought first, a cooling, then two days of wet weather, then the storm cleared leaving cooler weather behind.

The clearing of the storm happened at dusk, with the dramatic clouds, moving east, lit by a setting sun.

The next morning I awoke to see the lakebed, mostly dry, blanketed in white, a soft, smooth surface hiding the lowlands but letting prominent formations peek through.

As the sun began to brush the cloud tops, the smoothness began to change, as if threads were pulling bits of cloud upward.

The surface was quiet, almost unmoving, looking like a photo of stormy seas- still, but showing turbulent currents frozen by the lens.  The photo below is not of the sky.  It is looking down on the sunlit top of the cloud, with the ridge of the background mountain showing in the upper right.

As the sun continued to rise, it pulled the cloud with it, dividing the lakebed from the peaks.